"Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects". — Kimberlé Crenshaw
Can you Hear the Sirens Moan is a group show looking with and thinking across intersectionality as a means for reaching otherness, for transforming, altering, acting and interacting with our surroundings. It is an exposition of what resides, or is being considered as, unheard, unintelligible, a-rhythmic. It’s a collection of traces and remnants of various processes of labour, of reminiscences often neglected, dismissed, stigmatized.
The exhibition aims on exploring the voice of these inherent qualities of the artwork, on forming through their time and space, when the works are in a fragile state of becoming. It intends to disrupt the syntaxes and automations of the art system through rejecting the finalized, fixated form. The artworks as concrete (non)-objects, theses and systems, are being replaced by a composition of materials, liquids, words, failures and experiments.
Emily Roysdon reframes the theoretical concepts of intersectionality when talking about Ecstatic Resistance. She writes that “Ecstatic resistance develops a positionality of the impossible as a viable and creative subjectivity that inverts the vernacular of power”. The traces of the works exhibited try to touch and be touched by this impossibility. They act as intersessors participating in art’s systemic frameworks, whilst longing for their change. They let personal narratives and collective histories to exist otherwise, they re-arrange institutional terms, re-invent time structures. They re-act morphing a current with their willful presence, creating a stage for being together, for exchanging sentiments, knowledges, attitudes, performing selves, wounds, breaths, kisses.
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez traces intersectionality as a methodology on “how to resist from within oppressive systems, such as the art market, the institutional art world, the cycle of fame”. "can you hear the sirens moan" becomes a haptic animation of such a thesis, espousing its politics and poethics, borrowing a term from Denise Ferreira da Silva's theory, for its materialization.
can you hear the sirens moan is an exhibition striving for a politicization of the idiolect.
*the title is borrowed from "Don't Let It Bring You Down", a song by Neil Young
Ioanna Gerakidi
PERFORMANCES
hit n hug, by to kosie
18 Nov 2018, 18:00-19:00
Ithakis and Eleni Skoura Street, Kipseli
Google map
hit n hug looks closely on art labour as a practice of giving by pushing it to its limits. Its structure draws in three phases, to talk about practices of hosting, gifting, welcoming, whilst concurrently accepting the anger, the insecurities, the tiredness that such gestures imply. In the first phase, the artist is exposing its relationship with the material. A relationship full of closeness, resentment but also care. Creating an object becomes an practice that evolves through the hugs and hits, through the interaction with another entity, through losing both entities on the way. The object created through the connection is a twisted, restrained, floating post-capitalistic body.
Yet the art labour is never enough. Artists are always expected to give more and more. In the next phase to kosie destroys the object, it lets go of everything that happened before. The process circularly reaches its end, only when it finally gifts pieces of the object. to kosie does so espousing the pain of loss, the anger of never ending expectations, the fear of being used, but also the hope that the material fragments of the process will generate togetherness between its holders.
TEMPERED BREATHE, by Anat Propper Goldenberg
23 Nov 2018, 17:00 - 17:30
Church of St Theresa, 32 Eptanisou Street, Kipseli
TEMPERED BREATHE is a work about waiting. Waiting for someone, waiting for something. Praying and waiting.
Staying active in the time of waiting, which is supposed to be a passive act.
Artists short bios
to kosie's works revolve around materiality of crisis. The nickname ‘to kosie’ and pronaun 'it' is a gesture of giving up on the privilege of being a person. to kosie considers engagement with the materials as a base of an interaction, which remains are usually sculptures and videos. Recently it is looking for post-capitalistic body, working with giving as an alternative for expoiting, rethinking collaboration and artists' labour. to kosie was exhibited at the Main Project of 6th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Pori Biennale III, The Festival of Political Photography in Helsinki, Gallery Labirynth in Lublin, Rietveld Pavilion in Amsterdam and many more.
Anat Propper Goldenberg, (b. 1971, London) is a multidisciplinary artist.
The texts operating as work descriptions are written or chosen by the artists themselves. Snehta would like to thank Felipe Katotriotis for his technical support and contribution in regards to screen printing methods.